The Shadow Cabinet Read Free Page A

head ballooned larger than life, the bubble-gum kiss on the Moral Majority valentine PBS was blowing the nation’s capital on a rainy night following another Redskins loss.
    â€œHe’s an airhead,” said Cyril Crofton, a thin, dyspeptic CIA analyst.
    â€œPure celluloid,” Buster Foreman said, “a Baptist shyster—Genesis, grits, and shit. Ask Murphy when you see him, ask him about Senator Combs. He was at the embassy in Athens when Combs came through. Ask him what kind of shyster Combs is.”
    â€œWhere is Murphy these days?” asked Nick Straus, his gray head still damp from the rain. Haven Wilson was surprised to see him there. He’d come wandering in a few minutes before Wilson, like a stray cat, arriving on foot from his house a few miles away. Small, fiftyish, with mouse-gray hair and mild brown eyes, he’d worked twenty-five years at the Agency as a Soviet analyst and arms control technician, but had been retired during the housekeeping sweep of the late seventies. He’d hired on with a beltway defense firm, lost his job, been treated for acute depression, but six months earlier had been hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.
    Improbably, thought Wilson, who couldn’t explain it. The Nick Straus who sat next to him now was only the ghost of the man he’d known for fifteen years. He’d attended his retirement luncheon at Langley, when Straus had received the career intelligence medal. Wilson thought he’d deserved better. He remembered the luncheon now, looking at Nick’s shoes. His socks didn’t match, the shoes were shapeless black oxfords with worn ripple soles, and the feet didn’t look like Nick Straus’s feet at all.
    â€œMurphy’s selling commo systems out of a place out in Rockville,” Buster Foreman said. Fuzzy Larson came back from the bar in front. “A letch,” Foreman continued, still watching Senator Combs. “He doesn’t sweat much, either, you notice that? It must be a hundred and five under those lights and he’s not cooking, not even sweating.”
    â€œThe guy’s a jerk,” Fuzzy Larson said loudly. He was short and blond, the dome of his head covered with a fine feathery down, like an Easter chick. A former FBI and CIA technician, he’d left Langley a year earlier to open a forensics crime lab with Buster Foreman and a retired FBI lab man. “Look at that mouth, how wet it is. Always working too, you notice that. All juiced up.”
    â€œTell them the story about Combs in Athens,” Buster suggested, “the story Murphy told us.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” Larson recalled. “It was one of Combs’s staff aides. I forgot all about it. Do you know who I’m talking about, Combs’s number one aide, what’s his name?” He appealed to Haven Wilson, who knew the name but only shook his head. “Anyway, Combs comes through Athens with this staff aide, who gets some Greek broad in the rack and tries some funny business with her, the way he thinks the Greeks do. So she yelled her head off and someone had to shut her up quick. This aide is drunk, the control room crowd at the hotel in Athens is running around like crazy, doing the funky chicken, and so the station did it, deuces wild. Three o’clock in the morning and they get the goddamned station chief out of bed to buy off a ten-dollar hooker. Combs was sleeping right there in the next room, so you know he’s gotta know what kind of meatball his staff aide is. What do you think of that?”
    â€œThey’re all meatballs,” Buster Foreman said, his eyes still lifted to the television screen. “Look at that idiot. I’ll bet he diddled his way through Bible school down in South Carolina or wherever it was. I’ll bet he’s still diddling.”
    â€œSo what did Murphy have to do with it?” Cyril Crofton asked.
    â€œHe had to come up with the